Breaking Connections

by Albert Wendt

  ‘Your mother’s husband has died …’ Mere continued.

  ‘… of a heart attack …’ Aaron added.

  ‘… at their home in Kaitaia,’ Laura said.

  ‘His tangi is at 11 a.m. this Wednesday,’ Cheryl ended. The tears in her eyes were not – no, not ever – going to make him change

  his mind.

  ‘She is aiga, but that Palagi is not!’ he declared, and drained his bottle swiftly.

  ‘Okay, fair enough, Daniel,’ Mere said, and he was immediately wary, because Mere had a brain that out-thought all others. ‘He is not our aiga, but your mother is …’

  ‘And you want us, as aiga, to go to her husband’s tangi?’ he interrupted her. They all nodded. ‘That’s the correct thing to do, Mere. So you go right ahead and do it.’ He took out his wallet, emptied his money onto the coffee table, and said, ‘That’s my contribution to our aiga’s koha to the tangi. I doubt if he’ll be having a Samoan tangi – Cheryl’s grandmother has always considered the Fa‘a-Samoa wasteful and primitive – so you won’t need to take any fine mats.’ Before they could persuade him to lead their delegation to the tangi, he sprang up and, collecting another cold beer from the fridge, disappeared into the back yard.

  A short while later, a tearful but angry Cheryl confronted him. ‘Dad, I want you to go with us to the funeral.’

  ‘Darling, it is not her funeral. And I don’t go to funerals of Palagi I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn bastard, Dad, just like Uncle Aaron said.’ She wheeled and started running back into the house. ‘You’re just a mean, fucking hypocrite, Dad!’

  That was the turning point. When Cheryl, Laura, Mere, Aaron and Paul returned from the tangi, Cheryl didn’t bother any more to hide from him any information she had about her grandmother, and what she and her brother were doing with her. A month or so later, he heard Cheryl telling Laura that her grandmother was leaving Kaitaia with a new man to settle in Wellington, and that Grandma was going to pay Cheryl’s air fares to go down there for the school holidays.

  ‘I’ve made an appointment for you with Uncle Aaron’s lawyer tomorrow at 10 a.m.’ Cheryl intrudes into his thoughts. ‘And I’ve taken the week off to chauffeur you around. I hope I’m not going to regret it.’

  He thanks her and glances over at her, but she’s focused on the road. ‘We can spend a week together, eh?’ he remarks. She nods once, and refuses to look at him. ‘I’ve been – been – unreasonable about my mother,’ he hears himself saying.

  ‘Unreasonable?’ she scoffs. ‘Dad, there you go again.’ Then, staring straight at him – and he wants to avoid her accusing eyes – she says, ‘Dad, I’ve forgiven you for betraying my mother.’ He has no counter for that.

  ‘I – I don’t know why I can’t forgive my – my mother. At times, there are no rational – yes, rational – reasons why you feel and act in certain ways,’ he lies.

  ‘Dad, stop. Stop being yourself. Stop lying to yourself,’ she counters.

  A short while later they are in her garage, and unloading his bags. ‘I‘m flying down after Aaron’s funeral to see her,’ she informs

  him. ‘Her husband died a few months ago.’ He picks up his heavier suitcase, indicating he doesn’t want to hear any more, but she’s not going to let him off. ‘She’s on her own in an old people’s home.’ He starts heading for the garage door, unaware of the weight of the suitcase, but the air around him feels and smells like a weaving sea of congealing amniotic fluid in which he can barely breathe.

  28

  Daniel and Cheryl take one of the lifts. He hadn’t expected this: Aaron’s lawyer is located on the fifteenth floor of the Benthan Towers, one of the most impressive buildings in downtown Queen Street. All glass the colour of varnish, the building now glows like translucent skin in the mid-morning summer light.

  ‘I knew Uncle Aaron was the Man, but I didn’t know he was this big!’ Cheryl whispers as they enter the expensively furnished and carpeted lobby of the law firm. In front of them, behind the well-groomed receptionist at the marble counter, on the white marble wall in large gold letters is ‘MILLS, WALKER and ASSOCIATES’. Considering the nature of what Daniel believes was Aaron’s ‘business’ activities, he’d expected some seedy office hidden away from public scrutiny. He is surprised and impressed by the visible opulence of Aaron’s lawyers.

  Cheryl following, he walks towards the counter into the middle-aged receptionist’s wide smile and flawless make-up. ‘Good morning, Mr Malaetau!’ It’s a sweet and admiring welcome.

  ‘Good morning,’ he replies. ‘This is my daughter, Cheryl.’

  The receptionist greets Cheryl and, turning to Daniel, says, ‘Mrs Mills is expecting you, sir. Please follow me.’

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ Cheryl says, and she takes the nearest armchair.

  Ten or so paces down the lushly carpeted corridor, the receptionist raps respectfully on a door, opens it and stands aside to let him enter. He does so, and is blinded by the silver-white sunlight that is flooding in from a long row of windows that opens out to the city and sky and the Gulf.

  ‘Welcome back to Auckland, Mr Malaetau,’ a deep alto voice breaks through the light. ‘I’m Katherine Mills.’ He extends his right hand towards the figure outlined in the light. Her grip is firm, trusting. ‘I’m sorry about the power of the light today, Mr Malaetau, but perhaps you are used to the tropical light of Hawai‘i.’ She indicates a soft chair beside the coffee table, on which there are cups and saucers and biscuits. He takes it, and she sits down in the opposite chair. He blinks a few times, and his eyes adjust quickly to the light.

  She asks about his arrival, and for a while they make small talk. It’s hard to tell her age because everything about her appearance and manner is expensive but subdued and deliberate; carefully cultivated to create the image of a person of culture, breeding and power, but someone who doesn’t care for those things in themselves; a supremely expert lawyer who will do whatever her clients want, providing them with the best legal advice and help possible, and procuring for them the best outcomes. She asks about his life in Hawai‘i, telling him she and her family had holidayed in Hawai‘i twice, the last time on Kaua‘i. She’d loved the landscape there, especially the Waimea Canyon. He finds himself giving her information he doesn’t normally give people he has only just met.

  ‘How long have you been Aaron’s lawyer?’ he asks a short while later.

  She ponders for a moment and says, ‘Since I met him at uni when I went back to do my masters. Years ago. He was finishing his masters too, in chemistry.’ It is another large surprise. ‘At the time I was a junior lawyer in another firm. Just starting.’

  ‘He never told us that – then or since then,’ he says.

  ‘Daniel – may I call you that?’ she asks. He nods. ‘He wouldn’t have, because that’s the way he wanted it. When we met and he discovered I was a lawyer, he said he would give me all his business if I promised not to let anyone know I was his lawyer.’ She smiles. ‘I agreed with him, because I had no expectation he was going to be a lucrative client. No, sir. He was poor, and I believed he wasn’t going to be a paying client then or in the future.’ She turns her face away from him. ‘How wrong I was’, she whispers, more to herself than to Daniel. ‘I agreed also because I trusted him.’

  Daniel isn’t surprised by that admission: anyone who helped Aaron usually came to feel that way about him. Inexplicably he doesn’t want her to be that confessional. ‘Ms Mills,’ he therefore addresses her, ‘… you’ve been his lawyer for over twenty years?’

  She nods, clears her throat and says, ‘When Aaron and I graduated, he persuaded me to set up my own practice. In those days, Auckland was dominated by a few Palagi law firms, and if you didn’t have the right connections you didn’t have a hope of being hired. But that didn’t deter Aaron, and you know how irresistible he is when he wants you to do something.’ Pau
ses. ‘Within a few months, I was established in K Road in a modest office that Aaron helped get for me, with a growing number of clients: mainly criminal cases, and mainly Pacific Islanders and Māori. I soon learned that most of my clients were being referred to me by Aaron. Aaron started buying property and other things through me. The amounts got quite large, and I asked him where he was getting the money from. “Please don’t ask me again,” he said. “I have wealthy friends who want their money invested, anonymously.” I never asked again.’ She pauses, waiting for Daniel to speak, but he doesn’t. ‘Right up to the day he came for me to write his will – and that was only three years ago – I didn’t know anything about what he called his “Tribe”. There was an unwritten agreement between us: he didn’t want to know anything about my family and life outside my office, and he didn’t want me to know anything about his. It was quite painful for me to adhere to that. When he sat down opposite me and, avoiding my eyes, started dictating his will, I thought I had him: he now had to reveal to me some of his history, and some of the people and circumstances in his life.’

  ‘Weren’t you ever tempted to investigate his life without him knowing?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course I was, but I knew if he ever found out, he would severe all his ties to me.’ He can see a slow sadness rising in her. ‘He once told me, while he was sitting in that chair having coffee – and I’ve never forgotten the feeling of unshakeable finality and threat that was in and around his statement – “Katherine, you do not want my life to taint you and your family. Best that you only see and know my best side.”’

  ‘Do you think he ever delved into your life, without your knowledge?’

  ‘You think he would’ve done that?’ She sounds genuinely surprised.

  He chooses the easy way out. ‘I don’t know. Like you, I didn’t know much about Aaron’s “other” lives. Mostly I saw his best side.’

  ‘Are you sure, Daniel?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’ He feels Aaron’s amused presence in the room.

  ‘Because he has made you the sole executor of his estate,’ she says, her scrutiny of him unwavering.

  ‘Perhaps for the same reason he chose you as his sole lawyer and remained loyal to you all this time,’ he replies, almost waiting for Aaron’s usual ironical laughter. She rises, goes to her desk and brings back a leather-bound folder. When she is seated again, he has to ask. ‘Did you expect him to die – to die the way he did?’

  She looks away from him, and starts shaking her head, but stops and then says, in almost a whisper, ‘I suppose I did, and I dreaded it.’

  ‘We dreaded it also – but we didn’t do anything to stop him, because that’s the way he wanted to live. Or should I say, some inner power compelled him to live that way.’

  ‘Always at the edge; always in danger,’ she says. ‘And always trying to be in control.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t want to speculate but I think he knew who were going to cause his – his end, and how he wanted them punished.’

  For a breathless moment, Daniel tried not to believe her. ‘How do you know?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Some of it is in his will.’ She smiles and looks over at him. ‘I think he has also prepared his utu.’

  ‘Who do you think killed him?’ It was so easy to ask it, though he didn’t want to face that terrible revelation.

  ‘Perhaps some of his “close associates”? But he kept me out of his ‘otherworld’ so I don’t know.’

  They sit for a while in silence, as the gallery of Aaron’s close associates that Daniel knew about paraded through his mind, with Feau and Bonzy being the most demanding of his attention.

  She opens the folder in her lap, puts on a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles with purple-black lenses, and says, ‘It is a simply worded will.’ She pauses. ‘Aaron always had an elegance and simplicity about him.’ She waits for his reaction, but he maintains his silence, so she asks, ‘Do you want me to read it to you?’ He nods once. She starts reading Aaron’s will.

  Contained in himself, he stands close to Cheryl, who gazes up at him with concern. She reaches over and holds onto his left arm. The elegant lift descends as if he is descending into the complex depths of Aaron’s will, into implications that grow and grow, lushly, into an intricate and inescapable web with him as the untangler, the unraveller; it is a role he doesn’t want but knows Aaron has deliberately assigned him. The will is three pages long and in simple lucid English, but it is like an inspired and well-ordered poem whose surface simplicity, when you dive into it, opens into seas that change colours, tides, meanings and feelings with every reading. But this isn’t a poem to be appreciated and deciphered. No. Aaron is leaving him the ‘results’ of his life and the total responsibility for dividing and distributing that to the members of their Tribe and others named in the list of beneficiaries. If he rejects that role, it will all go to charity. Aaron’s laughter echoes in his head, knowing what will happen if Daniel, the unraveller, allows that: the people in the list would hold him responsible for giving away their entitlements, and the harmony and alofa in the Tribe would disintegrate …

  ‘Are you okay, Dad?’ Cheryl rescues him from his contemplation.

  ‘Yes, I just have to think it through.’

  ‘Think what through?’

  ‘Your clever Uncle Aaron’s will,’ he replies. ‘I have to administer it and ensure his wealth, his estate, is shared out according to his wishes.’

  ‘What’s in his will, Dad?’ she asks.

  ‘Sorry, but I’m not allowed to tell you or anyone else, darling. Apart from his lawyer, I’m the only one allowed to know the full will.’ She looks disappointed. ‘You know how your uncle was such a mysterious guy – with a weird sense of humour and justice. I think he’s put me right in the shit, and he’s now enjoying watching me trying not to drown in it.’

  ‘What do you have to do now?’

  ‘Arrange his funeral and burial.’

  ‘What sort of funeral does he want?’

  He tells her, and her face breaks into a shining smile, her eyes aglow with mischief. As the lift reaches the ground floor and the door slides opens, he puts his left arm round her shoulders and they walk into the lobby, Cheryl trying to suppress her erupting laughter and Daniel joining her.

  The lobby floor is shiny grey-white marble that catches their laughing reflections as they move across it towards the front entrance, as if they are dancing.

  29

  Over the years, all the members of the Tribe have prospered: Keith and Langi are now secondary school principals, Mere is a judge in the High Court, Paul is a professor of history and Cherie is the senior partner in the architectural firm she founded. Laura is the major partner in the lucrative and influential law firm she established with Mere. Aaron, according to his will and his lawyer, is or was the wealthiest among them. Yet without ever discussing it, all of them, apart from Daniel, have remained in the humble Freemans Bay homes they’d been born in. When Daniel and Laura had saved enough money for a deposit, they’d bought a home in Wellington Street, four houses from the house where Daniel had been raised. As Freemans Bay had become gentrified in the 1970s and 80s, most of the Māori and Pacific Island families they’d grown up with had sold their homes to developers, who’d offered them what were then considered ‘absolutely great’ prices.

  As Cheryl drives him to Mere’s home now through the heavy after-work traffic, Daniel tells his daughter this, and she says: ‘Dad, if I could afford it I’d buy a house there too. It’s where I was the happiest.’

  ‘So I wasn’t such a bad father, then?’ he asks, trembling with gratitude.

  ‘Most of the time, Dad.’ She smiles, and he reaches over and lays his hand on her shoulder. ‘Aunt Mere’s right – it’s our tūrangawaewae. And I hope Mum leaves Phillip and me our home.’

  ‘It’s where your
uncles, aunts and your mother and I were the happiest also.’ He continues talking about their life in Freemans Bay as they turn off the motorway into the evening that is starting to stretch across the city.

  Earlier that afternoon, he reluctantly and with trepidation rang Mere, then Keith and Paul. Unable to face Laura, he asked Cheryl to ring and ask her to come to Mere’s home that evening for their first meeting to do with Aaron’s death. Mere agreed with him that the Tribe would not bring their spouses and partners and children to the meeting. ‘You can’t face talking to Mum, eh?’ Cheryl says, again bringing him down into the challenging realities he has to confront. He shakes his head and starts recognising the houses and streets they are driving through, and he wishes he was back in Honolulu, far away from Aaron’s will and having to ensure that the Tribe agrees with how he is going to administer it, with Aaron watching his (and their) every move and enjoying it. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. She hasn’t got a steady boyfriend and she told me she’s looking forward to seeing you.’

  He tries to contain his surging wish to see Mere as they hurry up the footpath, through the lush garden of native shrubbery, nīkau palms and ponga that, over the years, Mere’s mother, who died the year before he left for Hawai‘i, had planted to remind her of her childhood up North. Before they reach the front steps of the house, Mere, in her usual at-home uniform of floral ‘ie lavalava and black t-shirt, is striding down the path, crying, in Māori, ‘My beloved Tanielu, my beloved brother!’ She is stooping down and enveloping him in her long arms and, after the hongi, she is crying into his shoulder, and he into hers. ‘I’ve missed you, Dan. We’ve all missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too, sis.’

  She pulls away from him and, scrutinising him through her tears, says, ‘Hawai‘i must be good for you. Ya look great in black skin.’

  ‘You’re jus’ jealous of my suntan,’ he jokes.